Let Freedom Ring!

November 6, 2008, 9:30 am; posted by
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“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ”˜We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.\’ ”
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Whatever Barack Obama was on Monday, today he is my president. I know that many of us — and by “us,” I mean conservatives and Republicans — watched the results of the election with a sense of dread, borne either by the fear of what a liberal president might do to the “right to life” cause, or the terrifying shadows of campaign rhetoric that somehow Obama will turn out to be a Muslim extremist or an agent for socialist change in America. But I think America is bigger than the sum of all those fears, real and imagined.

We must not let our short-term political disappointments cloud our senses and rob us of what should be a time of great rejoicing. I read through the text of King’s “Dream” speech this morning, and I have to say it gave me cold chills. In a way, it set my heart rejoicing. He noted that he had been asked, “When will you (the devotees of civil rights) be satisfied?” His answer was to quote the book of Amos: when “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

It reminded me of Lincoln’s second inaugural address, when he wondered aloud if the horrible war they were fighting was God\’s judgment on slavery, and noted: “Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3000 years ago, so still it must be said: “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

I cannot help but rejoice at the setting to rights of this nation’s past history of injustice. Perhaps it is because I live in the South, where the wound still aches in the sneers and smart remarks of my fellow white companions. Perhaps it is because I still remember the day I used the “N-word” — a word I had heard from my father many times — on the lone black girl at State Street School in Watertown, NY.

I remember how she followed me all over the school yard, smoldering anger in her eyes as I ran away. She never caught me, but the janitor, Mr. Allen, did. And when he found out what I had said, he slammed me against the wall and told me to never use that word again.

He was a white man. It was the first time I had ever seen a white man stand up for a terrified and helpless black child. It was the first time I saw that what I was learning at home from my father might not be right.

I rejoice that hopefully today 250 years of slavery is answered — every lash, every drop of blood — and that indeed “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”


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